Biography Memoir category: 96853 books

John Wain presents a major biography of England's greatest man of letters. He describes how "Johnson often mixed with people who were desperate human wrecks, some of whom were close friends; to the end of his life he filled house with people who were not successes in the eyes of the world, yet at...

Books by Clive Cussler, grand master of adventure, have been published in over 40 languages and 100 countries, appearing more than nineteen times on The New York Times bestseller list. Set against a backdrop of the world's mysterious, uncharted, and treacherous oceans, his intrepid protagonists battle...

"A triumphant success. . . . His prose is confident, clear . . . occasionally perfect." —Dennis Potter, The Times (London) "It is impossible to suppose that this ‘Life' will ever be superseded . . . the best literary biography to appear for many years."—John Rothenstein,...

In this exquisitely rendered memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. A Strong West Wind begins in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle–a place of both boredom and beauty,...

A poignant memoir of a full life and an impending death, written by one of America’s foremost journalists during his battle with terminal cancer.   For three decades, from the end of World War II well into the Watergate era, internationally renowned newspaper and magazine columnist Stewart Alsop...

From Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin comes a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry. Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker’s Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in a Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where...

When Aldous Huxley died on November 22, 1963, on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he was widely considered to be one of the most intelligent and wide-ranging English writers of the twentieth century. Associated in the public mind with his dystopian satire, Brave New World, and experimentation...

Louis L'Amour was born in the right place, at the right time-the railroad/cattle town of Jamestown, North Dakota just past the turn of the 20th century. By the time of his birth in 1908, much of the surrounding area was well established as farmland. Even further out in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and...

A wickedly funny memoir with echoes of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, Beautiful People (originally published in hardcover as Nasty) is now a BBC comedy hit series from the producer of Ab Fab and The Office. Proclaimed "the most brilliant, brash thing in type" by Liz Smith,...

The first biography of an American master The Songs We Know Best, the first comprehensive biography of the early life of John Ashbery—the winner of nearly every major American literary award—reveals the unusual ways he drew on the details of his youth to populate the poems that made him...

“A memoir of three generations of women rich in historical detail” —from the Civil War to the Jazz Age (Kirkus Reviews)   Shortly after her mother’s death in 2011, Sallie Bingham discovered a blue box in her mother’s closet containing the forgotten remnants of her foremothers’ lives....

The first book by distinguished novelist, journalist, and literary critic Rebecca West: a biography of Henry James Setting the standard for a century’s worth of criticism, Rebecca West diagnosed Henry James as an American who “could never feel at home until he was in exile” in this slim,...

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. After his father's death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works...

A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories. After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger...